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To Honour The Dissidents
There is no principled argument for censorship - only arguments from power. As John Milton observed in Areopagitica, the censor must assume themselves above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness - which man is clearly not. Man is an imperfect creature, and anything he builds will in turn be imperfect. These imperfections will lead to the degradation and eventual collapse of his creations. The greater the flaw, the sooner this will occur. A civil order is no exception to this rule, and all of man's systems of governance hold deep contradictions that cannot be resolved by a greater commitment to the existing order itself, because it is the existing order that is responsible for the problem. A contradiction becomes a point of conflict and a point of conflict becomes a nexus around which pressure against the current system will build. Those who are disaffected by the status quo will find one another, and put pressure on the established order to resolve their complaint. This is why liberal democracy is such an unusually stable form of government. Like all philosophies, liberalism is riddled with contradictions, but maintains itself by minimizing the effects of such through the use of free speech. Unlike a socialist or fascist regime which must criminalize free thought and suppress dissidents, a liberal democracy welcomes them as the canary in the coalmine. Dissidents are a sign of the problems that the status quo itself is creating, and the liberal order survives by adapting itself in line with the complaints; not only to ease this pressure, but to fulfill the purpose of the liberal state in the first place: to guarantee the rights of its citizens. However, this can only be done if people are actually able to voice their complaints, to raise the alarm. This is not just a favour that we extend to people - we consider it integral to their very personhood. Free speech is one of our human rights. From the perspective of a socialist or fascist state, it is necessary and desirable to criminalize, suppress, and persecute opposition to preserve the painstakingly established top-down order; the liberal state has no such ideological goal. Censorship must, therefore, be repugnant to a liberal democracy, as its only purpose is to preserve the hegemonic power of the established order from change. The state is given a mission beyond preserving the rights of its citizens, and this gives the state justification to ignore or suppress your rights when it is deemed necessary. There is no objective line that can be drawn of unacceptable or acceptable speech; the degree to which one censors is arbitrary, and the scope of what could be censored is practically without limits. The more often we censor, the more normalized censorship becomes, and the new normal creates new extremes closer to the centre that in turn must now be policed. One might wish to outlaw the "n-word", and once that is done, by what logic do we resist outlawing further insults or slurs against black people? As people become accepting of the new normal, they become sensitive to those closer breaches, and the noose of censorship draws ever more tight. There is no compelling reason why we should stop at any point until all speech is regulated by censors with unlimited power and zero restraint. Through our own good intentions to try and prevent racism or any other social malaise, we increase by degrees the number of citizens who are declared to be enemies of the status quo as we turn the state tyrannical in our attempt to perfect society. Around this new nexus of contradiction, the persecuted gather, and they have tangible justification for their resistance to the state - after all, they were persecuted by it for exercising their natural rights. Where free speech prevents violence through dialogue, censorship guarantees violence by making it the dissidents' only remaining option. To prevent this, we must remember that, no matter how unsavoury the message, all dissident voices are important. : Source: https://youtu.be/p3I1YDbSLQk Category:Transcripts